Poor Town: For single moms, no easy path out of poverty

Sappharie's mom, Dicie Cooper, wants a career. She is a test away from a GED, her first step toward becoming a pediatric nurse.

Eloise's mom, Jordan Carpenter, wants to work, too. She aims for a "steady life," now that she's finished cosmetology school.

At the moment, careers are just part of the middle-class dreams of Cooper, 18, and Carpenter, 20.

Both are poor and unemployed. Both are single mothers: Cooper has three children and Carpenter has one.

Their resolve to succeed is strong. It needs to be. Climbing the economic ladder is difficult for single moms and their families.

In 2012, half of all families led by single moms in the city of Rockford lived in poverty, according to U.S. census estimates. For mothers with children younger than 5, the percentage was 62.1.

Local statistics

Unwed women giving birth used to be a societal stigma; it's not so much of one anymore. In 2010, 49.3 percent of births in Winnebago County were to unmarried women, according to the most recent figures released by the county Health Department. The number mirrors a steady seven-decade increase in unwed births nationwide.

Single mothers often have limited financial resources to pay for education, child care and health care. That can affect their children and the communities where they live.

Children who grow up poor are 1.3 times more likely than their more advantaged peers to have learning disabilities or suffer developmental delays or exhibit behavioral and peer social problems, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report, "Using a Public Health Approach for Improving Child Health and Development."

According to the CDC, poor children often have lower academic performance, complete two fewer years of school, engage in riskier behavior and earn less than half as much in the workforce.

In three of the poorest areas of Rockford — ZIP codes 61101, 61102 and 61104, on the west and southeast sides — more than 60 percent of births between 1999 and 2009 were to unmarried mothers, according to the Health Department.

Teen pregnancies, which fell steadily in Winnebago County — from 15.3 percent in 1980 to 11.2 percent in 2010 — were twice as high in the 61101 and 61102 ZIP codes.

"A lot of these young women have never been around a man and a woman who are married," says Vikki Noe-Eltvedt, executive director of Rockford MELD, an agency that helps mothers in poverty work toward self-sufficiency. "The concept of marrying before children is foreign. They have no expectations about having a male householder.

"My personal opinion is, that's all that they know because that's how they've been raised."

MELD, an acronym for Moms and Dads Establishing Life's Direction, provides shelter, education and life-skills training for young families.

Census estimates show that 6,200 (43.8 percent) of the 14,110 households in Winnebago County with minor children and a single female parent were in poverty in 2012, says Deborah Lischwe, associate director of health systems research at the University of Illinois College of Medicine in Rockford.

Among married couples with children younger than 18, the poverty rate was 5.7 percent.

"It represents a disadvantage to everyone involved, from the standpoint that two typically is better than one in raising children, and it's far better economically," says Mike Bacon, administrator for the Winnebago County Health Department.

"It's a contributing factor to poverty figures locally and nationally."

Nationally, children growing up in families led by single women are four times more likely to be poor than those living in a married-couple family, according to the nonprofit Brookings Institution in Washington.

On their own

Single moms tend to have less education and work experience, which means any jobs these sole household breadwinners get are likely to be low-paying.

A Health Department analysis of 44,162 Winnebago County births between 1999 and 2009 found that:

34.9 percent of unmarried mothers had less than a high school education, compared with 14.4 percent of married mothers.56 percent of married mothers had some college or a degree, compared with 23.8 percent for unmarried moms."The effects of growing up in single-parent households have been shown to go beyond economics, increasing the risk of children dropping out of school, disconnecting from the labor force, and becoming teen parents," the Population Reference Bureau wrote in a 2010 report, "U.S. children in single-mother families."

"Although many children growing up in single-parent families succeed, others will face significant challenges in making the transition to adulthood. Children in lower-income, single-parent families face the most significant barriers to success in school and the workforce."

Some single moms receive support from parents, a boyfriend, fiance, the child's father or a domestic partner. A significant number of women are on their own, however, when the child is born.

They must find the means to raise the baby, which, since the 18-month Great Recession ended in 2009, has become more difficult in a manufacturing region that fell off the economic ledge.

Researchers say that for every 1 percent change in the jobless rate, the number of people living in poverty changes 1.5 percent. In May 2007, Rockford's jobless rate was 5.4 percent; it spiked at 19.1 percent in January 2010.

The number of people in Boone and Winnebago counties who were living in poverty went from 29,152 in 2000 to 60,544 in 2010.

Unemployment has fallen, and 2012 census estimates show that poverty in the region has declined, but it is still higher than state and national levels.

The poverty threshold is a 50-year-old federal estimate of the minimum required for individuals or families to pay for basic expenses. Those who fall below it may be eligible for government benefits, such as food stamps, child care assistance, housing subsidies and other welfare.

The poverty threshold is based on family size. A senior citizen living alone with an income of less than $11,011 is living in poverty, as is a single mother with three children who earns less than $23,364.

Neither figure hits the "self-sufficiency standard" for living here, according to "The State of Social Well-Being," a report released in February by Rockford Regional Vital Signs, a planning consortium of 30 agencies from Boone and Winnebago counties.

That number is $28,725, and represents the minimum income required to cover no-frills housing, food, transportation, health care, household and personal items, and taxes. The group has collected and analyzed hundreds of data sets on social, economic and environmental conditions in the region.

Need for degrees

Researchers say education is the way out of poverty for single moms.

But motivated single moms often must choose between working 20 to 30 hours a week to pay for rent and food, or attending school, Noe-Eltvedt says.

MELD operates a homeless shelter and 22 transitional apartments for mothers with children. Its budget is $1.5 million.

Last year, MELD received 529 requests for shelter of housing. It turned away 224 mothers and children because there was no space.

"We are always full," Noe-Eltvedt says. "The need is much greater than the resources that we have.

"Who gets housing is based on need. A mom and child living in a car get precedence over someone living with Grandma."

MELD clients are poor, most coming from poor families and often led by single moms. "For us, most of the time it is multigenerations of poverty."

In addition to needing education and jobs, clients may be substance abusers or suffer from mental illness.

"Putting someone in an apartment is great, but it's not going to work if you can't address all the other issues," she says.

A client can spend up to 2½ years in MELD programs.

It is drilled into clients that education is the first step to self-sufficiency for them and their children.

If they didn't graduate from high school, MELD clients pursue a General Educational Development credential. With a diploma or GED, they are steered toward programs that will help them become certified nursing assistants, pharmacy technicians, dental assistants, ultrasound technicians or phlebotomists, or toward other careers that require shorter training periods.

That allows them to move quickly to the second step of self-sufficiency: employment.

Still, a high school diploma or GED and a job do not guarantee that a family will rise above poverty. Circumstance often plays a role.

"If they make it to us when they are pregnant or with the first child, we can help," Noe-Eltvedt says. "But when they have two or three kids, it's nearly impossible" because bigger families need more expensive housing and incur higher household expenses and transportation costs.

MELD works mostly with single mothers who range in age from teens to 25.

In Winnebago County, white mothers accounted for nearly two-thirds of the county's unmarried births (1,259) in 2010, according to the Health Department. Among African-American women, 84 percent (584) of children were born to unwed mothers in 2010.

"There are direct correlations between minority female-led households and households in poverty," the Vital Signs report says. "The relationship is reversed for white female-led households."

Not all unmarried moms running a house are poor or going at it alone. Some live with parents, a child's father, a boyfriend or domestic partner. Some are receiving child support. Some are single because they're divorced, widowed or separated.

"A lot of folks look at data on the percentage of births to unmarried women that have gone up steadily over time and link that directly to the issue of kids being raised by single mothers," says Larry Joseph, director of the Fiscal Policy Center at Voices for Illinois Children in Chicago.

"It's a little more complicated than that."

Child care

In Illinois, Joseph said, about half of single moms were co-habitating when a child was born; overall, a father wasn't living with a mother in about 25 percent of the cases. But the poverty rate for single mothers is still extremely high, and the financial gap between married couples and single mothers has increased since the recession.

One factor that's often overlooked is the cost of child care for single parents, especially when children are young. Married couples have options. One spouse can stay home if need be, or they may have two incomes and be able to afford it, Joseph says.

"If you look at single-mother households, the poverty rates are highest for those who have kids who are not yet of school age. That makes sense because it's much harder for them to get a job and pay for the child care."

Voices for Illinois Children lobbies for child-friendly laws, but Joseph says policy changes aren't likely to have a quick impact.

"The single thing that affects poverty rates over the medium term is the state of the economy. So until we get the economy nationwide back where we need it and get unemployment rates down much further, we're still going to have more problems for these types of families."

And problems faced by households led by single mothers are community problems, Ron Haskins told the U.S. Senate in testimony last year. He's co-director of Budgeting for National Priorities and the Center on Children and Families at Brookings.

"Since Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur published 'Growing up with a Single Parent' in 1994, social science research has repeatedly shown that children reared in female-headed families are more likely to fail in school, more likely to be arrested, more likely to get pregnant as teens, more likely to have mental health problems and to commit suicide, more likely to get a divorce when they grow up, and more likely to experience other negative outcomes."